kangaroo court 19th century: an illegal court that punishes people unfairly
Not everyone is happy with the investigation into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament over whether he broke Covid rules. Some allies of the former Prime Minister have dubbed the process a “kangaroo court”, a description that suggests that the committee in charge might be improvised, illegitimate or corrupt. The committee members are not amused.
The earliest written sources of the phrase “kangaroo court” are American – not Australian, as you might expect. A 1841 article in the Daily Picayune from New Orleans quoted another journal reporting lynchings “on charges of the Kangaroo Court”. This may, however, be a result of the presence of Australian miners in America. Why Kangaroo Courts? Perhaps because they were the ones that dealt with “claim-jumping” (when someone tries to take over someone else’s mining area). Others looking for the metaphor in the phrase have suggested that the court itself was “jumped up”, or that the improvised system of justice proceeded by leaps and bounds. Or even that the process was in the “pouch” of the accuser. The origins of oral phrases are frequently elusive.
And what of the word “kangaroo” itself? The Oxford English Dictionary cites Captain Cook’s journal from 1770: “The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru.” The “natives” he refers to here were the Aboriginal people at what colonialists called Endeavour River, Queensland. This claim was then rubbished, replaced by a widely held belief that the word means “I don’t understand”, given as an answer to Cook and his crew’s attempts to speak English to the Indigenous people. Linguistic fieldwork, however, has since confirmed the existence of a word “gangurru” in the northeast Aboriginal language of Guugu Yimidhirr, referring to a species of kangaroo. So it may be that Cook was not so wrong after all.
Rather as with Mr Johnson’s notion of truth, the origins of both “kangaroo court” and “kangaroo” are not so easy to pin down.
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
